SCOPE

This lifeline of our civilization is energy. Sustainable energy systems will dictate the progress of our civilization in the near future since the need to efficiently acquire low-cost, clean, and renewable energy is tremendous. The smart grid has recently emerged as a promising technology to motivate such sustainable energy systems. Researchers, industries, and governments are all trending toward a transformation of the traditional electricity grids into smarter grids where technologies from different disciplines meet to facilitate a real-time alignment of energy demand and supply through a bi-directional communication between the energy provider and its customers. According to many researchers, the smart grid can be considered as one of the strongest and specialized examples of the Internet of Things (IoT) applications within which millions of advanced sensors and interconnected devices, and embedded intelligence will be exploited to offer us better information for controlling our energy world. As the smart grid is expected to be eventually deployed across all utility networks, it will become an even more dominant application domain of the IoT, and may even be referred to as the Internet of energy (IoE). While the smart grid helps bring the IoT closer to reality, it also illustrates many challenges and dangers inherent to the IoT.

This event is likely to open the door to encourage researchers discuss the smart grid challenges, particularly from the IoT point of view to construct energy, control, and information processing systems of the smart grid.

TECHNICAL SCOPE

The IoT is a grand vision as it ascribes the concept of millions of interconnected intelligent devices that can communicate with one another, and thereby control the world around us. Technically speaking, the smart grid can be considered to be an example of the IoT composed of embedded machines, which sense and control the behavior of the energy world. The IoT-driven smart grid is currently a hot area of research boosted by the global need to improve electricity access, economic growth of emerging countries, and the worldwide power plant capacity additions. GlobalData, a renowned consulting firm, forecasted that the global power transformer market is anticipated to increase from $10.3 billion in 2013 to $19.7 billion in 2020, with an astounding compound annual growth rate of 9.6 percent due to the phenomenal rise in energy demand in China, India and the Middle East. Therefore, it is the perfect time to invest research initiative, e.g., through our event, in the IoT-dominated smart grid sector.

In addition to its timeliness, the event comprises a broad range of interests. The theme invites ideas on how to achieve more efficient use of resources based largely on the IoT-based machine-to-machine (M2M) interactions of millions of smart meters and sensors in the smart grid specific communication networks such as home area networks, building area networks, and neighborhood area networks. The smart grid also encompasses IoT technologies, which monitor transmission lines, manage substations, integrate renewable energy generation (e.g., solar or wind), and utilize hybrid vehicle batteries. Through these technologies, the authorities can smartly identify outage problems, and intelligently schedule the power generation and delivery to the customers. Furthermore, the smart grid should teach us a valuable lesson that security must be designed in from the start of any IoT deployment. Since there is an alarming lack of standards to address the protection of the secret keys and/or the life-cycle security of the embedded smart grid devices, intruders could use conventional attack techniques to breach the security just as in any other IoT deployment.

In order to address and solve many of the tough challenges in the IoT-driven smart grid, prospective authors are cordially invited to submit their original and unpublished research contributions to this event on the following technical areas of (but not limited to) smart grid communications.